Are you serious? I have trained many cats as therapy pets and they certainly exhibit behaviours that could be understood as empathy. Since animals have a much diminished capacity for communication as compared to humans and interspecies communication is problematic at best we cannot say for certain one way or another. Actions don't always imply intent. To imagine that higher animal life forms cannot experience empathy is every bit as wrong as imagining we know for a fact that they do. This is currently unknowable. While empathy seems to be required for morality experiencing empathy does not guarantee morality. Humans have pronounced (incorrectly) that animals cannot make tools. Humans have also claimed (again incorrectly) weapons specifically were human devices exclusively. Humans who pronounce that animals like dogs and cats cannot experience empathy are full of shit. We don't know if they do and we are only just beginning to understand how to find out the answer to the question. Empathy requires self-awareness and many animals have demonstrated self-awareness in different experiments. I don't claim the animals I have trained are in fact empathetic but I do know enough to reject any claims that they do not. The jury is still out but I lean towards some form of empathy in higher mammals. While I have been told by others I lean this way because of my personal attachment to the animals since we are speaking about emotive states it is not unreasonable to use emotional attachment to uncover emotive states. I've tried an experiment of placing a cat in front of a mirror and then directing a laser pointer to the animals side so it is visible in the mirror. The animals that make the best therapy pets inevitably correctly discern that the dot visible on the mirror image of themselves is actually on their side. Certainly I look for other specific behaviours in selecting which animals are best suited for such work but no animals that have failed this test for self-awareness that I have rescued exhibited the other behaviours necessary to become therapy pets. I am well aware that behavioural scientists claim cats and dogs always fail this test of self-awareness. Gorilla's also always fail this test yet many birds pass and many behavioural animal specialists still claim Gorilla's are self-aware but fail the test for unknown reasons. Mice fail this test but have recently been shown to exhibit behaviours that one could attribute to empathy. The mirror test for self-awareness is not perfect and we make the mistake of anthropomorphizing animal behaviours when we label them as evidence for self-awareness. I'm not suggesting the test is worthless just that claiming the results are definitive proof against self-awareness is unfounded. "Failing" the test suggests but does not prove lack of self-awareness. The animals that are the consummate narcissists do not make good therapy pets (and they never pass the mirror test).
John Thornton